Fantasy

A massive tome, in the full trilogy ... and wonderfully populated with few obvious heroes, although there are mighty deeds (and sacrifices) aplenty.
The author is from "down under" and sees the world, perhaps, askew. I don't quite know what to say, except I read it two years ago and am still waiting for a long vacation to read it again -- "all in one gulp". It haunts me. ( )

One of my favourite genres is fantasy, but over time, I've been more disappointed by fantasy novels than not. Often, it's not that the stories are unoriginal, but more that the writing is so appallingly bad, the characters so unlikely or two-dimensional, and so forth. Because let's face it: in terms of plot possibilities in this genre, almost everything has already been done. What elevates one book out of the rest is the characters, the writing and the pacing of the story.

The Castings Trilogy combines all three of Pamela Freeman's books about a world of inequity (where a race of invaders oppress the original inhabitants of a place called the Eleven Domains), where stonecasters foretell the future, where the dead can be raised and where one stonecaster/sorcerer decides to raise the dead of his vanquished people and destroy the descendants of the original invaders.
So far - nothing that new. What is great is the pace of this fairly gigantic trilogy (1200+ pages), the vividly realized characters, even the secondary characters whose view points are described to add context and depth to the story. In general, I've disliked the practice of novelists in recent years of having multiple shifting points-of-view in a novel. Curiously, in this trilogy, though the POVs shift constantly, I wasn't troubled - because the writing was so good, the characters so well portrayed, and because the shifting POVs advanced the story almost transparently.
But where are good characters without a good setting to back them up? The world of the Eleven Domains is one of the most fleshed out fantasy settings I can remember, its history being revealed slowly in numerous ways. The Eleven Domains has a tragic and intriguing past, and one which is forgotten and misinterpreted by its own inhabitants.
There is no real good and evil in this novel - except perhaps that of two relatively secondary characters. Rather, the story shows the outcomes of painful choices made, some bad, some good.
I really enjoyed this – and will seek out other work by this author. ( )